by Michael Mercadante

Created on: April 20, 2009

Somehow, I don't even know when it happened, but the airwaves were taken from the citizens of this country and placed into the control of the government. But I do know when the government gave that control of the air to private corporations.

President Bill Clinton, who said that "the purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people" and "we can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans", signed the Federal Telecommunications Act into law in 1996. This law dramatically relaxed media ownership laws, allowing large companies to begin gobbling up independent media outlets in a creepy, cannibalistic feeding orgy, the result of which is that, here in the Philadelphia area, thirty commercial radio stations are run by only five corporations.

The worst of these corporations is Clear Channel, a corporate monster that owes its entire existence to the 1996 deregulation. It now owns more than 1,200 radio stations nationwide, five times as many as CBS or ABC. In addition, it owns or exclusively books thousands of venues, giving it an unfair monopoly over the entertainment industry. In the Philadelphia market, Clear Channel controls everything from The Tweeter Center to the TLA. And it uses this monopolistic influence to affect what bands you hear, and what bands you see.

After 9-11, Clear Channel, which owns seven stations in Philadelphia, blacklisted dozens of songs from airplay on any of its stations nationwide because of their "questionable" content. Among the subversive songs we're no longer supposed to hear: John Lennon's peace classic, "Imagine"; Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water"; and The Bangles' "Walk Like An Egyptian".

Clear Channel has also been accused of strongarm tactics against record labels, forcing them into exclusively booking their venues by threatening to pull music from rotation on their stations, according to lawsuits filed against them by Cincinnati and Denver, among other cities. In other words, if a band plays in a venue that doesn't belong to Clear Channel, that band loses airplay on more than a thousand stations nationwide, and won't be heard on more than sixty percent of America's rock stations.

For those of us who are music fans, we're stuck in the middle. The only bands we can hear on the radio are the ones the Recording Industry Association of America (the RIAA) is letting us hear. And, with most of the venues controlled by the radio stations, those may also be the only bands we get to

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